There’s no formal designation of what makes a ‘golden’ rum – after all, this is rum and rules are few and far between – but these are generally mellow, more complex spirits benefiting from some oak maturation. As for the category as a whole, character varies enormously from place to place, and distillery to distillery.

In particular, golden rum is where the skilled blender earns his or her corn. Many of the rums here are a mix of rums distilled by the continuous method and via pot stills, producing spirits of hugely divergent characters which have to be melded into a harmonious whole.

Golden rum is elusive, running the gamut of intensity from lightly fragrant to rich and powerful; it’s the place where the skill of the blender shines through, where pot still and continuous still spirits are intertwined to create rums of great complexity, and where the worlds of cocktail and sipping rums overlap.